


All Gifts (Have a Price)

by unincased



Category: Bernice Summerfield (Big Finish Audio), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Hypnotism, Manipulation, Mind Control, and the plot wrap-up comes out of the mouth of a LIAR, but really it's just a spoopy collection-era cursed artefact story, just brax things, the thought processes of a man who only thinks he's well-put-together, very awkward attempts to to be good at caring for people in a non-alien way, you know!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 18:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18288035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unincased/pseuds/unincased
Summary: Benny brings back to the Collection broken pieces of a Greek jar. It just keeps slipping from Braxiatel’s mind that he needs to put it away.(The one word that can never be used in a riddle is the answer to what it asks.)





	All Gifts (Have a Price)

The Braxiatel Collection has no limits and sets for itself no bounds. It is rumoured that there are cloister halls that unfold over themselves, cataloguing the development of ecclesiastical architecture in complex shapes that make you believe in God; that, turned on its side, with liquid falling drop by drop into the water supply, the Holy Grail gives unnatural health to all the place's inhabitants; that the dimensions inside the buildings are bigger than the dimensions outside them, so intruders quickly become lost in the endless labyrinth and are only found years later as archaeological remains ready to be excavated and put on display. There are so many departments and so many rooms that it would be easy to hide something in the darkness there. It would be easy to seal it up in an old, wooden box, slip it into a dusty alcove, turn off the lights on your way out of the room, and lock the door behind you, knowing it will never be found again.

And Irving Braxiatel is always collecting.

 

 

“Here it is, just as ordered. Greek jar, eleventh century BCE, perfect condition, painstakingly extracted, cleaned with _incredible_ effort and precision, and, oh, still in pieces. Not that I couldn't do put it back together—in fact, I could do it easier with this than with that Villenite bowl you begged me to reconstruct over a glass of your most expensive brandy two weeks ago. Every piece I'd need to do it is here. I looked. And it's so perfectly shattered that it's practically telling me to put it back together. But no, Irving Braxiatel wants it broken, so broken it is. Now would you like your broken vase in a pile, or would you like it piece by piece? Any way you please, Brax.”

Bernice Summerfield's tirade was discordant against the melodious sweeps of Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat major, but at least it kept time with the grandfather clock. From across the mahogany writing desk, Irving Braxiatel smiled, the fingertips of one hand tapping against the back of the other.

“Second shelf on your left will be fine. Just leave it in the box. I'll file it away myself later.”

Benny didn't move to the shelf, putting the box—just as ancient as the vase within, but in much better condition—down on his writing desk instead. All the better to plant her hands on as she forced him to make eye contact. “Have I ever told you how much I love it when you're vague and mysterious?”

“No, Bernice, I don't believe you have.”

“That's good, because I'd have been lying.”

“Really, Benny.” Braxiatel rose from his desk, his old leather chair making no sound as it slipped back to let him go. That was one of those unnatural talents of his that made him seem like a ghost, a god, or a lie playing at reality. He knew it distracted Benny and made other people wary of him, so he never learned to stop. Braxiatel rounded the desk and opened the doors to his study, turning back to smile at his favourite archaeologist. The smile promised no answers, just a calm sleight of hand that would hide its subject from sight and, hopefully, mind. “I think this recovery deserves a celebration. A drink in the Hall of Mirrors, perhaps?”

“Irving.” She turned around, removing her hands from the box. Her steel gaze had seen planets ruined by excessive love of mystery, and it surely had limited tolerance for Braxiatel’s obsession with being vague. “I will not be won over by any bottle of alcohol you wave my way. I know you too well to trust you when you're smiling like that.”

“Please, Bernice! To suggest I would try to distract you with alcohol. I merely hope to discuss a Greek word with you over a glass of Craxatonian chardonnay. It's related to your findings, I assure you." A measured pause. "The word, not the spirit; the spirit is just very good.”

To her credit, she had waited a full half-minute after he mentioned chardonnay before unfolding her arms. “And what word is that, Irving?” Then she was at the door, not looking at him, as if that could wipe the smugness from the curve of his lips. 

“ _Elpis_. Do you know it?”

“As it happens, I do.” As Bernice walked past, Braxiatel flicked off the study lights. “That old jar dug up some memories on it. Ancient Greek goddess of hope, right? Daughter of Nyx, mother of Pheme, usually a young woman carrying a symbol of plenty in her hands.”

“Correct, but not complete,” said Braxiatel. “ _Elpis_ is _hope_ , yes. But it can also mean _expectation_. And expectation can also mean _fear_. More broadly speaking, you could say that _elpis_ might be defined as _expectation of the future_ , whether that expectation be a rapturous, uplifting delight, or a terrible dread at the base of our stomachs. It's really a rather wonderful little word in its ambiguities.” He closed the door to his study behind him and, holding forth on all the nuances of a long-dead culture, led Bernice away.

Alone in a room that was not what it seemed to be, the box stayed sealed. And it waited.

 

 

_We were a broken thing, but we will not be. We were sleeping, but we will become awake. You seek us out with idle hands that do not know what they are doing, and your fingers trace the pieces of what we were and will again be. Do not mind the blood you spill, our pet. Do not think on it. Only do as we ask._

_Be honoured! You were chosen by us._

_Be happy! You are helping us._

_Be silent. You will make us complete._

 

 

“Uncle Brax, it moved.”

“Hm?” Braxiatel looked up from his writing. Peter, of course, had come into the room, in all his sure-footed no-longer-quite-a-toddler glory. (Brax made a note to himself to double-check human and Killoran development phases again. It was often very difficult for him to keep track of how Peter was supposed to grow in the future, and of course Brax wanted to be certain that he was happy and healthy. For that, knowledge of what his development was meant to look like was a necessity.) So Brax had noticed Peter coming in and filed it away as something to attend to if he got too close to anything dangerous or valuable, and then he had turned back to his work.

Yet he hadn’t noticed was how close Peter had gotten to his desk—to the box that sat upon it. Brax looked on the box a moment, trying to recall something. His eyes flickered back to the paper he was writing. But then there was movement—Peter’s hands on the box—and Braxiatel found himself on his feet and shouting, “No!” and grabbing Peter’s hands to stop him.

“That hurts.” The boy was frowning. Braxiatel looked at him and saw the pain in his eyes and quickly let go, drawing back, but then Peter reached out for the box again and Braxiatel yanked it away without knowing it, flinched hearing the shards clatter against each other within. And now Peter was _really_ frowning at him.

“Peter,” Braxiatel said, calmly and slowly, because everything was fine and Peter had to be safe, “You can’t touch this. It’s… very valuable. Your mother worked very hard to get it for me, or rather the thing in it, and it would be very disappointing if anything untoward happened to it courtesy of idle hands.”

The persistent frown was a problem for which Braxiatel could not calculate the answer, but he made the attempt, trying to run the numbers back to the root cause. Braxiatel was behaving abnormally. That would always be alarming. And he had hurt Peter, which was a stupid mistake to make, and he had moved fast. So, he had to do the reverse of that. Braxiatel breathed and he smiled and he turned himself back into Uncle Brax, and then he measured his strength that was so much more than a human’s but so much less than a Killoran’s to find the perfect metric for a hybrid child, so that he could offer Peter his hand.

“Now,” he said, still Uncle Brax, “why don’t we go find your mother? I’m sure she’ll be wondering where you’ve wandered off to.”

“Mummy’s with Uncle Jason,” Peter said. Braxiatel immediately decided that he didn’t want to know. And then Peter continued, “They’re angry,” and Braxiatel decided that he _really_ didn’t want to know.

“That’s a shame,” he answered. “Shall we go see your father instead?” Peter still hadn’t taken his hand, and after a moment of looking down on it himself, Braxiatel set it back on top of the box. The idle thought that he still had to file it flitted through his mind as he felt the itch of the painted wood against his fingertips.

“Uncle Jason said he’d be home last night but he wasn’t.” It was said with such simplicity and acceptance that Braxiatel decided, whatever developmental stage Peter was at, he was old enough to know as well as Brax did how incredibly exhausting it was to deal with _that_ particular kind of argument. Peter added, “Daddy’s working.”

So the path from Bernice’s home to Braxiatel’s study became clear: Jason and Benny in a row, driving the boy out of the house; Adrian working in a place too dangerous for a child; Beverly away and Clarissa gone, leaving Irving Braxiatel in his quiet and distant study the closest thing to something familial left for keeping this child company. A sorry state of affairs by any measure; Braxiatel hadn’t been suited for childcare even among his own people, and he was more at a loss with these ephemeral children than he had been with those whose childhoods were measured in centuries. Braxiatel looked down at the papers that waited for him, and then he looked at the little boy who was standing in front of him with literal puppy dog eyes. That boy would be a heart-stealer one day. If time could be outwitted. If Peter and Benny could be kept safe.

Braxiatel _would_ keep them safe. And that started here.

“Well then,” Braxiatel said. “While I cannot precisely say that I am any _less_ busy than Bernice and Adrian, I suppose that it would be fair to say that I am less _occupied_.” Braxiatel glanced back at his desk, saying, “Why don’t you and I take a walk to the Theatre and put on something fun, and I’ll leave all of this work to—” 

There was a box on his desk. There was a box on his desk, and he kept forgetting about it.

“Peter,” he said, and he was still calm, safe Uncle Braxiatel, “What was it that you said moved?”

The child pointed towards the box and a sharpness lanced through Braxiatel’s skull. Even over the equations that awoke in his head, he could hear Peter tell him, “It was the box.”

“I see.” Steady and safe. “Did it do that while you were looking?”

“No,” Peter said. “But it was close to you and then it was close to the side. I saw.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just imagine it?” 

“I _saw_ ,” insisted the child, and Braxiatel recognized the indignation of his voice as coming more from the maternal than paternal side, which meant it was an indignation that could not be stopped, only deflected.

“I believe you, Peter.” He made his mouth curve back into a smile. He made his lungs expand, then hold, then contract. “Well, don’t worry about the box. Uncle Brax will take care of it shortly. For now, we were going to the Theatre.”

“What are we going to see in the Theatre?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How about… anything you want? As long as your mummy wouldn’t be very angry with me for it.” When Peter smiled at Brax, Brax found his own smile strangely easier to wear. At last the boy offered him his hand and, recognizing the cue, Braxiatel accepted it as he stepped around and away from his desk. Brax was unsure of his hold even still, wary of making it too strong despite the agonizing precision of his measurements. But Peter seemed happy and safe. That was what mattered.

He made another mental note to check some books on how to support not-actually-a-toddler-anymore children (what _was_ that phase called?) in very complex, very chaotic family structures. And as he walked and spoke to this child, his thoughts reordered themselves towards the next goal, and ideas he could not have sealed themselves away.

 

 

“Thing is, you don’t _need_ me to verify the Galmarin finds immediately, so maybe I could take a teensy break while me and Jason work this out? It’s not like you’re on top of your work yourself, Mr High and Mighty, so you don’t have much of a high ground to stand on for lecturing me about getting right on it.”

As far as Benny’s reasons to dodge catalogue duty went, that had to be one of her worst. Having long ago determined that a snort of a derision was _not_ a gesture he was eager to add to his repertoire of affected human behaviours, Braxiatel opted for the clear signal of two raised eyebrows. “I assure you, I am completely on top of my work.”

Benny did not have Brax’s reservations about snorting. “Oh, bollocks. Look at your desk!” 

This again. People were always so surprised at the state of his desk—Benny had been, the first time they had met in his relative chronology—but it was particularly exasperating to have go through it all over again for the sake of this absurd argument. He clicked his tongue at the very idea. “Bernice, we’ve had this discussion. A tidy desk is the sign of a tiny mind. My desk is full of scattered documents and artefacts so that—”

“No, not that, I remembered that one. Best excuse for a messy room I’ve ever heard.” She grinned in response to the look he gave her, which was entirely what he knew she’d do, but he still had to do it. “No, I meant that. Didn’t you say you were going to file that thing away weeks ago?” He followed the line of her gesture. He saw the box.

The box. The box, still there. Once more at the edge of his desk.

And Braxiatel took an inventory of his mind and all his thoughts over the past few weeks, and he found there were failings. He was going to put the box away when he first got it, he knew that. He had said it. And Peter had pointed him to the box and Braxiatel had known it had been playing with his thoughts then. Why had he not put it away? He knew he could not keep it out, he had to have it out of mind, out of sight, his sight or hers, _all_ of theirs, and he stood so abruptly that at the edge of his vision he registered Benny startling back but he brushed it aside, could not attend to it against that stab of agony drawn back out of his head. It was outwitting him, it was manipulating him, it was going to keep itself _here_ and he would see it, _they_ would see it, they would ask and wonder and find out what he had sealed inside and how very clever of her to keep slipping it out of his head—what a perfect trap, to make him either keep her out in front of everyone or think about her so constantly that the lid would slip, how cunning and ruthless and perfectly like her—

“Brax!” 

He did not know how the scene had come to change, but he registered it all in an instant as if from a balcony seat: the box fallen to the floor, the shards it contained scattered and in the open; Benny in front of him, her hands against his arms to support him; and oh, there he is in the scene, that's him—unbalanced, _stumbled_ against his own desk, holding onto his own head. Taut lines of pain through every part of him, there for anyone to see.

Damn.

Braxiatel drew himself back into himself. He measured the expansion of his ribs to accommodate the expansion of his lungs, and he measured the inverse as he let his breath leave. He smiled, and he looked into Benny’s eyes, and he was Irving Braxiatel. 

But her answering smile was still weak, and he knew he must’ve scared her. And he still had the most terrible migraine.

“Now, if it were me,” Benny said with a laugh as unpersuasive as her smile, “I’d say that you’d had a few too many highballs before dinner. Or I wouldn’t say that, as there’s no such thing, but the point I’m making here is that I know your lot can’t have too much unless you decide you want to or get too eager with a ginger beer. And while my expertise in human body language might not extend to suspiciously human aliens, I think I’ve got enough of a leg-in on the field to know that this either means that something else is wrong with you, which I'm going to take a wild guess would be a big problem, or you _chose_ to get drunk. Though now that I think about it, that one might actually be worse.”

Oh, dear. He scared her so much she was _babbling_. That would have to be corrected.

Braxiatel straightened out both himself and his clothing, and he arched one brow at a height so precise he had repeated it in exactness before her hundreds of times. In his steady, smooth voice, he told her, “I’d thank you not to speculate on any potential choice to become inebriated on my part, Bernice. That particular habit is one I prefer to leave to you.”

“Hey!” Ah, indignation. The perfect leverage. “I’m worried about you and you’re going to start going off about _my_ drinking?” 

With a calm half-smile, Braxiatel crouched down at the side of the desk ( _steady_ ), righted the box ( _normal_ ), and began to pick up the scattered piece ( _safe_ ) with neither hesitation or hint of pain. He said, “It isn’t your drinking that I’ve ever objected to, Bernice. Merely, at times, your drinking’s consequences.” 

“The consequences of my drinking!” Benny knelt to help, too, though he wished she hadn’t, even as she continued her retort. “I’m not the one stumbling against his desk in the middle of the afternoon!”

(Benny wasn’t stupid. She didn’t have to be. She merely had to trust in where he led her.)

“Did I say it was my drinking?” His mildest voice. “I don’t recall doing that.”

Her scowl. “I don’t recall you saying what it was at _all_.” 

His smile. “No, I didn’t, did I.”

“Irving Braxiatel, so help me, if you drop dead sometime in the middle of the next week, you better have a good severance pay policy for me because I’m not being put out on Peter’s birthday present just because you won’t tell any of us that you’ve got whatever version of a soap opera disease your people are susceptible to.” 

(Joking about it. He almost had her.)

“You aren’t aware of that ‘Deceased Employer’ termination clause in your contract? Oh, _Bernice_.”

“What? What clause? What clause did you put into my contract, Irving Braxiatel?” 

(A yelp. He had won.)

Soon there followed a triumphant _Ahah!_ as Benny picked something up and held it before him. “And look at you! Now I get why you haven’t put it away: you wanted to reassemble it yourself. I mean, Brax, I get the appeal of a little hands-on work now and then, but you could just be honest that you wanted to play a little Ancient Artefact Jigsaw instead of getting all vague like there’s some kind of higher purpose.”

In her hands.

“What?” Though Brax said it, he did not hear either her words or his own. He could not look away from her hands.

In her hands, Bernice Summerfield was holding the fragments of a jar that no longer _was_ entirely fragmented. Shards, carefully pieced together, beginning to form a whole. Traces of conservator’s resin flashing in the study’s light.

And on those fragments, a woman’s eye was cracked in three places and staring into him.

Braxiatel snatched the reconstructed shard from Benny a moment before he remembered that he had to keep being Irving Braxiatel, but then it was too late. In her eyes he saw that worried look again, and Brax knew that if he wasn’t very careful and very good, all the trust he had built up in her since the Axis that he was safe and steady and fine again would break and she would worry. He could not let her worry. 

He could not let her know.

He said, “Benny, I’ll take care of the rest of this.”

“Hang on, Brax—”

“You’re right, I’ve been negligent, but I’ll look after it all now. Don’t trouble yourself. Now, don’t you need to pick up Peter? By my measure, he’ll be getting out of school any moment now. In fact—yes, I believe you're now late.”

“What?” Benny’s eyes flickered up to the grandfather clock and then she cursed and shoved herself to her feet. But she glanced back at him one more time, with that cheap and cheerful smile, and she told him, “Watch the ginger beer,” like it was a joke. So he smiled back, a distant and amused half-smile that insisted it _was_ all a joke, and he waited until she was out of his study doors.

Until he was alone.

Braxiatel looked down at the broken pieces of a broken jar. And he looked at the pieces that were not so broken, held between two of his own fingers, careful and still. They were fingers he would not let shake, never again. They were fingers he had used to reassure and comfort. They were fingers he had kept in his control. 

Hadn’t he?

Braxiatel smashed the joined fragments against the edge of the box and watched them break where they had broken before and shatter in new places for him. And when he gathered up the other fragments, he was rough and careless, and he saw his blood spill from his hand onto the clay and remembered from the colour, just off of human, why there was no one here or in all of space and time to whom he could reach out for help. He was alone in this, he knew that. And he was fine. Alone, he was enough.

Irving Braxiatel closed his eyes, and he murmured to himself ancient equations in a language unknown to any other on this Collection he called home. And when he looked up into that mirror on the mantle and saw his own eyes looking back at him, he measured their coldness against what he saw in them years before, and he tried to determine if there was any difference to be seen.

 

 

That night, he waited in the study, the box before him, the itching at the back of his head. He waited and he watched, and he set his hands before him on his desk. They were cold and angled and steady. They were under his control.

These were his hands, were they not? Hands that gestured in command of a whole planet. Hands that terrified Bernice when they trembled. He turned over his right. Dexterous. A scar he had chosen to keep, hidden just beneath the cuff of his suit. He turned over his left. Sinister. The fine line broken pieces had made already healed over, no trace of a wound. Yes, these were his hands. He knew what they had done, what they were doing, and what they would yet do. It was as he bade them.

But the box was in front of him. And who else could have put those pieces together without his knowledge?

His mirror watched him from above his mantle as he waited through the night. When morning came and no pieces had moved and all his body was his own, he could not say what he had proven. An absence of a contradiction is not a contradiction of presence, and not even Irving Braxiatel could watch himself every hour of every day. Sooner or later, surely, he would slip. 

Splinters of wood dug under his fingernails, and he stared into the last thing left behind. The lid had to be kept sealed.

 

 

A hard crack of wooden doors.

He rose from a labyrinth he made with calculations to the sound of violence in the rooms beyond. Braxiatel gathered himself to his feet and already he was making himself pristine and perfect, an unflinching image of who Irving Braxiatel had to be, and he strode as quick as breath from his private quarters and into the study beyond.

“What the _Hell_?” asked Bernice Summerfield. Braxiatel found himself in agreement.

His study was in scattered light, but he could make out the scene easily. Benny at the entrance to his study, her torch in hand, the crack clear in the busted-open doors. (He could imagine the way she cursed at herself as she forced them.) The box on the floor, all the scattered pieces of the jar spread out across the flagstones. 

And Jason Kane, kneeling on the ground before the box, fitting the pieces together without seeming to see them. 

Ah. The prison's back door.

Benny was moving in a moment, down at Jason’s side and grabbing him by the shoulders to stir him. “What are you doing? Goddess, Jason, I know I say you never listen to a word I say, but now is not the time to start taking that literally. Come on, snap out of it!” She waved her hand before his face, shook him, but there was nothing, no response, just him drawing away, the pull to repair the pieces overriding everything.

Well, it would, wouldn’t it? That was how Braxiatel had designed his hold over Jason to work.

Braxiatel measured air in, and he measured air out. And, after one sharp tug to straighten out his clothing, he was there at Benny’s side, a hand on _her_ shoulder, his voice as steady and firm as she had come to expect. “Bernice. You are not going to reach him that way. The artefact, that jar—it must have a hold on him. Latching onto his unconscious mind, no doubt, manifesting while he sleeps… Yes, that must be it. Nothing physical will be enough to snap him out of it.”

“Then what do we _do_?” How she hated being helpless. Braxiatel understood.

“ _We_ do nothing. But _I_ will intervene. If you wouldn’t mind?” He gestured for her to move aside, and when she obliged, he ignored her expression, just as he knew that ice-for-blood archrationalist Irving Braxiatel must, and instead he kneeled in her place. “Jason,” he said. “Jason, listen to me. Listen to me very carefully. You are here, you are with me. You are with Benny.” Yes, there were Jason’s eyes, now locked in his and a still world away. What a familiar view. “You’re here with us, Jason.”

“I’m here…” The voice was faint. Benny moved to speak but Brax stopped her with one raised hand.

He continued, “Yes, you’re here with us. And now you are setting down the pieces of the jar.”

“Setting down…?” The man’s hold on the pieces slackened. Slowly, they slipped from his fingers. The sound of clay on stone did not break Braxiatel’s focus on this man-turned-automaton.

“Very good, Jason. Don’t concern yourself with that any longer. It only matters that you are here with us. Now, on three, you’re going to wake up. One… Two… Three.”

A blink. Then a second, and eyes focusing—a frown, trying to register, trying to remember what was happening. Jason looked into Braxiatel’s eyes, and Braxiatel did not know what Jason saw looking back.

Then a terrible groan of pain, and Jason collapsed to the floor.

“Jason!” Benny was there in an instant, and Braxiatel stepped aside smoothly, completely uninterested in getting in her way. He breathed, steady and calm, as Bernice placed a hand against her ex-husband’s head and repeated his name.

“It’s the psychic exhaustion,” Braxiatel told her. “Whatever hold it had on him would have been quite draining. You’ve complained about him being absent at night with no explanation, correct? And I imagine that he always seemed rather exhausted when you saw him the next day.”

“Yes, but—” 

“A consequence of whatever entity exists in these pieces using him. No doubt he has not gotten any true sleep in quite some time. It never truly put him to sleep, just used his mind when it was less active.”

She laughed, just as she always laughed, but her eyes did not leave her ex-husband. “And I thought he was just going around behind my back again. Guess I should be grateful it’s just another cursed artefact getting into people's heads! Look at us all here, same old situation. It's another Tuesday on the Braxiatel Collection.” 

She seemed so sad. So guilty. If only Braxiatel could give her a different story. But even if the story changed, he knew the ending had to stay the same.

“Yes, well. I try not to make it _every_ Tuesday,” he replied. “Biweekly, perhaps. Every third if I can swing it.” Brax leaned over to his intercomn and contacted Dr Wt’hlm to come to his study immediately, with people to move an unconscious Mr Kane. He tried to hit exactly the right note of dry exasperation that was just a little detached but not _too_ alien. The balance was complicated, but he liked to think he had it down.

And there was Benny, with Jason in her lap, her fingers running carefully through his hair, her hands unable to do anything for him and yet there all the same.

She really did love that man. Braxiatel knew that. Jason meant so much to her. Losing him would hurt her more than Braxiatel ever cared to see. 

“The weird thing is,” Benny said, still looking at Jason, “I don’t remember Jason ever coming across the box. Do you?”

“No, I can’t recall Jason coming into my office in that time, either. But he has spent a great deal of time separated from us both, Bernice. Perhaps that jar made a connection to Jason a long time ago, a link that laid dormant, waiting for the moment to awaken. And when it came here, its chance had come.”

“You should have sealed it away when you first got it.”

“Yes, I should have. I will now.”

“Will that be enough?” 

“I’ll make sure of it.”

“Good,” she answered. Her smile seemed better then, and he found the measures of his breath easier to make. Then the medics were there, and they were loading up Jason with Benny at his side and holding tight to his hand. Braxiatel could tell she would leave with Jason, and that was good—that was better, even—but he wanted to ask one thing first. So while the medics did their on-site checks, he made his inquiry.

“Bernice.” When she looked back at him, he just slightly tilted his head. “One question from _my_ side of things, if you don’t mind. What in Heaven’s name were you doing breaking into my study?”

“Oh, that.” Benny rubbed the back of her neck, her mouth twisting into a shape that Braxiatel had come to understand as an expression of interpersonal awkwardness. “ _Well_ , like I said, Jason kept vanishing at night and insisting it didn’t matter where he went. I guess that must’ve been part of the thing hiding itself from us, but I thought, Hell, I’m an archaeologist. I can dig up the truth of this, and then I can dig up a grave to bury Jason alive in when I catch him in the act with whatever floozy it is this time. So I decided to follow him when he left the house. When he started heading towards your study, I realized it couldn’t be what I thought it was—though I have to say, for half a second there I was wondering if maybe I was still right and you and him were—”

“Please. Please don’t complete that thought. Just… don’t.” 

Benny grinned. “Something wrong, Irving? You're looking a little queasy there. Although to tell you the truth, that idea makes me feel about the same way.” Benny glanced down at the fragments one last time, and Braxiatel saw her archaeologist’s eyes fitting together all the broken edges. But no one would be trying that again. “How do you think that it worked, anyway? It didn’t do anything to me, and I travelled with it. Shouldn’t it have tried to get me to put it together while I was alone with it?”

“Ah,” said Braxiatel, “I have a theory about that too. About translation errors, and the power of belief on objects from myth. Evil finding a backdoor through which to slip free of its container. You’re familiar with the Greek _pithos_ for _jar_ , yes? And the unfortunately similar word for _box_ , _pyxis_ —or at least, unfortunately similar from the perspective of a sixteenth century Dutch scholar translating a work into Latin. They've become unavoidably entangled in the story. I suspect that the jar and the box required each other to activate the hold. I’ll have to separate them.”

It was absurd enough to match the logic of their lives that she bought it, as he knew she would. “And of course it couldn’t get to _you_ with all your defences,” she said, and then startled. “Hang on, you don’t mean this is the one from that myth, _the_ myth, that stupidly misogynistic story about all the evil in the world being sealed up in—Brax?”

Oh. He was wincing. How careless of him.

So he smiled his distant and genial half-smile, the Irving Braxiatel she trusted to always be alright, and he answered with comfort and ease. “It’s nothing, just a little headache. I imagine it comes from having my sleep interrupted by the domestic troubles of my employees. Ah, but it looks like it’s time for the medics to move. You’ll keep me updated on his condition, won’t you?” 

Any reply she might have, either about his headache or his commentary on her domestic troubles, vanished as all her focus went back to the unconscious man set out on a stretcher. Bernice left with a promise to let him know how Jason was doing over the next few hours and another joke about catching Jason in his rooms at night. And then, once more, in the quiet of his study, Braxiatel was alone.

Almost.

A mirror before him, a replica of _The Supremacy of Venus_ above. All around him were paintings of different areas of the grounds of the home he had made. And on the floor, waiting, were pieces of a broken jar, scattered around the box that would hide them all away.

“Well,” Braxiatel said to his reflection. “That should be the end of that.”

Picking up the fragments, he noticed what he had missed before: not all the blood on these fragments had come from him. A little older, a little redder—on one of the pieces, there was a stain, just a slight thing, that had come from a human hand.

Braxiatel closed up the box and tucked it under his arm. He hummed under his breath, ignoring the clawing at the back of his skull, and he sealed his study doors behind him.

 

 

The Braxiatel Collection has no limits and sets for itself no bounds. The rumours of its prizes are as widespread and extravagant as its owner’s grasp appears to be. It is a place designed for beauty and for wonder, with a mandate to preserve and protect and above all to share—to share knowledge, to share life, to share the future. Bringing the past into the present, the Braxiatel Collections looks forward with expectation of tomorrow and offers that tomorrow to all.

Deep within the twisting corridors of that reputable institute, within halls that appear for only one man and locks that answer to only one key, there is a gallery that is unlisted, holding artefacts without description or name. There are papers, there, old scrolls and newer writings; there are datapads and projections, sculptures and paintings and works of clay. Each object in this gallery carefully preserved; each object is carefully protected. After all, to preserve the works of lifekind is the Collection’s mission statement. But no one comes looking for this gallery. No one comes looking even for a wooden box, set up in a dusty alcove, with pieces of a broken jar inside.

It is a peculiarity about the Braxiatel Collection, noticed by no one, that if you look through its records, there is a certain glaring oversight in all of its archives. No matter what records you seek, no matter what books you check, a certain name is absent, as if vanished out of history: an absence that is hidden from being surrounded by so much excess. And because no one has noticed this peculiarity, no one has heard that name anywhere within the Collection halls. No one speaks it. And no one ever will.

The one word that can never be used in a riddle is the answer to what it asks.


End file.
